Baba Masha - Microdosing with Amanita Muscaria: Creativity, Healing, and Recovery with the Sacred Mushroom

Foreword

James Fadiman

Most people stop at the Z, but not me...

Youll be sort of surprised what there is to be found

Once you go beyond Z and start poking around!

DR. SUESS, ON BEYOND ZEBRA (1955)

Baba Masha, the name the author of this book goes by, says its contents came about through a series of mystical accidents. While there is a certain honest humility in that description, she does not give herself nearly enough credit. This is not only a book of discovery, but a wonderful example of how actual discovery happens, how much work there is to bring it about, and what it is in a life that makes a person sensitive or able to appreciate the import of the new knowledge when it appears. As important as being able to recognize what you have found, is to have the capacity to follow up on the initial discovery, and to keep opening other unanticipated doors. Baba Masha has done all that and more.

The book details thousands of healings that are not only unusual, but, as you will see, invaluable. To recognize them Masha had to overcome the most difficult of all obstaclesa strong, well-educated, and substantiated disbelief in what you are being told.

Science, in spite of its own opinion of itself, is often dead wrong. For example, there was a period in relatively modern European history when a number of natural history museums disposed of their collections of meteorites since the scientists of the day agreed, Meteorites cannot exist, because there are no stones in the sky to fall. Before you smile at their folly, reflect first on the accuracy of their statement. While we know that meteorites originate beyond the sky, that reality was not the obvious wisdom it is today. Right logic, wrong assumptions.

What is the science of today as it pertains to Amanita muscaria? Right now, if you open any mushroom identification book to Amanita muscaria, after it describes its shape, color, varieties, where found and so forth, it will add that it is toxic. In some books the toxic descriptions can be quite extensive, but even this brief one from Wikipedia should cool most anyones interest in trying any:

Fly agarics [Amanita muscaria] are known for the unpredictability of their effects. Depending on habitat and the amount ingested per body weight, effects can range from mild nausea and twitching to drowsiness, cholinergic crisis-like effects (low blood pressure, sweating, and salivation), auditory and visual distortions, mood changes, euphoria, relaxation, ataxia, and loss of equilibrium like with tetanus.

What these reference books usually leave out is that Amanita muscaria has centuries of good press. It is probably the best-known mushroom by sight to children and adults alike, appearing as the Christmas mushroom on everything from those Victorian lithographs with Santa, elves, and reindeer, to contemporary holiday cards and animations.

It is the mushroom credited by the mycological scholar R. Gordon Wasson and later by John Brough as Soma a substance described in detail in the Rig-Veda (ca. 1500 BCE) that, when ingested, makes one aware of ones relationship to Divinity. As Soma was not described as having seeds, flowers, leaves, or roots, the scholars reasoned that Soma was likely a mushroom and most likely Amanita muscaria.

As is always the case, other scholars disagreed.

More controversial was a theory proposed by John Allegro, a philologist, archaeologist, and Dead Sea scrolls scholar, that Christianity itself was a religion centered on the ritual use of this mushroom and that perhaps Christ was not a living person, but the essential nature of Amanita muscaria.

Even more scholars disagreed with this possibility. Among the arguments put forth by those who have a very different idea of the origins of Christianity is that Amanita muscaria grows predominantly in Northern Hemisphere forests and the necessary trees the mushroom needs to propagate were unlikely to have even been in the Holy Land in that era. More recent scholarship has found paintings in a number of medieval churches clearly linking Jesus and saints with this specific mushroom.

Fairly impressive credentials for a toxic mushroom.

As positive as all these possibilities are, contemporary descriptions and cases like the following are what gives Amanita muscaria its toxic designation.

On March 3, 1897, Count Achilles de Vecchj, an Italian diplomat being hosted by people in Virginia, requested a breakfast of Amanita muscaria, sadly confusing it with Amanita caesarea, an edible Italian mushroom that looks much the same. He ate between one and two dozen mushrooms and died several hours later. His convulsions were so severe that he broke the bed he was lying on. Out of his death and its ensuing lurid and widespread publicity, sprang a renewed North American interest in mushroom societies, especially in the Northeast, to provide much needed public education about edible and poisonous wild mushrooms.

Dismayed, perhaps even horrified, by the suggestion, the distinguished botanist, naturalist, and Amanita expert, Debbie Viess wrote an extensive scholarly article savaging almost every assertion and reexamining every reference in the earlier article to make it clear that to describe Amanita muscaria as anything other than toxic was a disservice to science and a danger to mushroom finders, professional or amateur.

What then happens when Masha, a well-trained researcher and physician in her own right, hosting an extremely popular nationwide program in Russia discussing peoples experiences using all kinds of psychedelics, gets a single report from someone who has been taking low doses of Amanita muscaria for his health? Her initial reaction: In his ignorance he might be killing himself.

If I were reporting about a video drama series, this would be a moment of dramatic tension. We, the viewers, would be left to wonder, is this doctor going be able to intervene and save this person? (And will it take several more episodes in the series before we find out?)

Reality, of course, is far stranger. Masha pushed past her training, past her own belief system, and thus began a counter-intuitive adventure where the looming edifice of prior science gets replaced with stacks and stacks of real-world evidence. What unfolds is a groundbreaking, paradigm-busting, citizen-science driven, alternative finding that the experts had never noticed, maybe never considered looking for.

There is a Sufi story about a person who passes by opportunity after opportunity for his own enlightenment. The story ends with the teacher saying, Thats why there are so many seekers and so few finders. Masha is one of those rare individuals, more enticed by an unmarked trail than whats already on the map. This was not her first encounter acting against conventional culture and likely not her last.

She was trained not only to be a physician, but to be an observer, paying more attention to the whole patient than to symptoms. That she had become adept in the use of contemporary media also aided her when the first reports about using Amanita muscaria came to her. Perhaps no one else had had the background or the opportunities. If they had, they walked by them out of ignorance or, perhaps, lacked sufficient curiosity.